


They Carried the Sky

by paratrooper-sam (BernardStark)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe – Vietnam, Alternate Universe – War, Animal Death, Character Death, F/M, Homophobia, Inspired by The Things They Carried, M/M, Mentions of Underage, Misogyny, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Character of Color, Period-Typical Attitudes, Prostitution, Racism, Stylistic Imitation, The Ballad of Dum Dum Dugan’s Hat, animal cruelty, featuring Peggy as the girl in the culottes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-10-30 14:40:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17830493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BernardStark/pseuds/paratrooper-sam
Summary: No one knew how Rogers managed to get himself into the same unit as Barnes, and in truth I never thought to ask. It felt strange during those first few days after he hopped off the helicopter along with the C-rations, but by the next week the question of his presence seemed fully answered. Of course Steve Rogers was there. Steve Rogers was there because Bucky Barnes was there. Where one went, the other followed.





	1. The Field Carries On and My Past Follows Me

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo I told [spitandvinegar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spitandvinegar/pseuds/spitandvinegar) exactly three years and sixteen days ago that I was trying to write a Vietnam War AU about the Howling Commandos. After two years of grad school and half a year of crying about the pains that come with having a real grown-up job, I finally managed to get my shit together enough to make good on this long-ago promise. So, here is the thing. I wrote this in an attempt to emulate the style and themes of _The Things They Carried_ , which basically means I wrote this specifically to make myself cry. So, that's the warning.
> 
> This will likely be updated sporadically because I am a disaster.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The working title for this chapter was “The Ballad of Dum Dum Dugan’s Hat”

Corporal Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader Dugan carried his army green M1 regulation helmet, which weighed five pounds. He wore in its place the sturdy brown bowler hat given to him by his father on the day of his high school graduation. As soon as the helicopters swung out of sight, he would swap his helmet for the hat and think about that afternoon, how he lost his mortarboard between the rows of metal folding chairs when he tossed it up in the air, how his father took his own hat off his head and settled it on Dugan’s. “Out in the world, son,” his father had said, “a man has something as long as he’s well dressed.”

That was sometimes the answer Dugan gave when people asked why he swapped his steel helmet out for a twenty-year-old felt hat. Other times, he’d look out into the dense jungle trees at the horizon line and say, “At least with the hat, you know what you’re getting.”

We called him Dum Dum, after the bullet. He got the name before any of us knew him, from his former unit, though he never really talked about it because he never really talked about them. Later, some of the men in Alpha Company ran into one of Dugan’s old buddies in the EM club during a stand-down. They were sitting at one of the long picnic tables playing cards with Falsworth’s funny English deck, and when they got to talking they asked Dugan’s old buddy how Dum Dum got his name. Dugan’s buddy laughed and said, “Man, Dugan. He expands on impact.” And that was all he’d say.

Falsworth said, “I thought it was about his intelligence. Only a dum dum trades his helmet for a hat in the middle of a war zone.” It wasn’t malicious, only the kind of teasing shared between friends, but Dugan’s buddy didn’t laugh.

Maybe three days after that night at the EM club, while we were still on stand-down, Dugan came up to me looking a little wild around the eyes, his hands knotted in the sleeves of his fatigue jacket, and said, “Hey. Morita. I can’t find my fuckin’ hat.”

 

Private James Montgomery Falsworth carried a funny English card deck, which he called a pack and which wasn’t really English but German. The suits were odd, only the hearts recognizable, with the diamonds, clubs, and spades replaced by colorful approximations of bells, acorns, and leaves, more complex and intricately detailed than the pips on a regular deck. He bought the cards in England, where he’d spent his formative years, and none of us had seen anything like them before. He told us they were German the first time he took them out, but we called them English anyway, just to make him scowl and roll his eyes and say, “Stop taking the piss.” The pack contained only thirty-six cards and weighed just over two ounces. It was strategic planning, bringing a set of cards 1.2 ounces lighter than the standard American fifty-two-card deck, because out there every ounce mattered.

It was also calculated to give Falsworth a leg up on anyone he played with, because none of the familiar games were possible with an abridged deck. He picked a game, gave only the bare bones of an explanation, and taught us the rules on the fly. He meant to leave us stumbling like drunks through games we barely understood, tied up in the unfamiliar suits, while he sat back and crushed us all. But he didn’t count on Cap.

Falsworth had stripped the sixes from his deck to play Sheepshead in one of the Alpha hootches with Jones, Dernier, Barnes and Rogers, who was wiping the floor with the rest of the boys. “Told you we shoulda played Skat,” Barnes was saying. “If it’s a game of strategy, our boy can’t lose.”

Cap grinned up at him. “I ain’t even tryin,’ hardly,” he said. He’d stripped down to his tac pants, barefoot and bare-chested. The others were similarly dressed down, Jones also in tac pants, Falsworth and Dernier in nothing but their skivvies. Barnes was in his shorts and an undershirt with his heavy jungle boots still on, although he’d unlaced them, and he knocked one into Rogers’ ankle to kick the smile right off his face.

On the other side of the table, Dernier was groaning under his breath and cussing Rogers out in rapid, angry French. The hootch was quiet except for their laughter and swearing, the rest of Alpha Company off partying or sitting in the makeshift theater across HQ watching the same movie they’d been screening for the past week.

The Sarge tried to peek at Cap’s hand and nearly tipped into his lap when Rogers leaned away, his dog tags clinking, laughing and hiding the cards against his bare chest. He pushed Barnes’ face away with his free hand. Jones was laughing at them from across the table, his cards bleeding all over the place, but he didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care.

“Boys,” I said, and they all turned to look at me. “Dugan can’t find his hat.”

 

Private First Class Gabriel Jones carried his sister’s old harmonica, which weighed 7.4 ounces and which she had spent three years saving up to replace with an M. Hohner 64 Chromonica. Jones brought it because his own brass horn was too big and too heavy to hump, especially with its case and the aluminum tin of spare reeds. Taking it without the protection of the case was to him unthinkable, like sending a knight into battle without armor, or a soldier without his gun. But the prospect of living half a world away from home with no music at all was apparently even more so, and so he brought the abandoned harmonica that had been languishing unused on the top of their mother’s piano ever since Elizabeth first brought home its replacement.

Being the radio man, Gabe Jones also carried the radio. As we all left the hootch to start the search for Dum Dum’s hat, he had it balanced on his shoulder, set to a local station. It was dark out and we were all a little drunk. Cap and the Sarge sang along with the Stones under their breath, belting out the chorus together when it came. _Oh, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find…_

Jones looked over at me. “Hey, Morita,” he said. “Listen to these white boys. Hump fifty pounds of ammo every day and they can’t carry a fucking tune.”

“We should get Dugan to sing it instead,” I said. “He’s pretty good.”

But Dugan wasn’t listening, still twisting his fingers in the cuffs of his sleeves, staring out into the dark. He had a full head of hair, thick and ginger to match his mustache, but his head looked oddly bare without the hat.

“How about you and me,” said Jones. I laughed.

“No way,” I said. “I’m worse than Cap.”

Jones adjusted the radio on his shoulder so he could turn and stare me down properly. “Nope,” he said. “Ain’t nobody worse than Cap.”

I glanced over at Rogers, but he didn’t seem to have heard us over the sound of his own singing and Barnes belting out beside him. They were stumbling into each other, weaving through the tents and hootches in the dark. Everyone had put their clothes back on, or at least enough to be presentable if we came across anyone who might care, and though we still looked a bit disheveled we were clean and well-rested, a little drunk, and high off the first warm meal we’d had in weeks. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were playing on the radio now, and the front felt very far away.

After the first twenty minutes of the search, Jones swore and moved the radio under his arm. “Why the hell did I bring this thing,” he said. “Jesus. I shoulda just brought my fuckin’ harmonica.” After a few more minutes lugging the radio around the mess tent, he went back to the hootch alone to stow it under his bunk. We were still looking when he came back out. Standing still at the center of the tent, the men moving all around him as they searched, Jones looked around as though he’d never seen the place before. He said, “Thought I’d do anything to hear some real music.” And then he bent down to look under one of the mess tables.

He’d brought the harmonica back out with him, and as we moved to the next place, retracing Dugan’s steps, he started to play. It was a military cadence, steady and simple, probably something he learned in basic. I’d heard him playing it before, although I didn’t know the words. One of the notes was off. A reed out of alignment, he’d told me. But the song kept going back to that one sour note, again and again. It was so simple, just a short little tune that repeated itself on a loop the way marching songs do, different words but the same notes underneath, and one of them gone bad.

Jones stopped playing and looked down at the harmonica, mouth twisted to one side. He said, “Why’d I put away the damn radio?”

 

Private Jacques Dernier didn’t carry anything from home, because every spare ounce he could bear was saved for explosives or scraps of explosives he came across in the field. Any usable parts were immediately stowed away in his pack. He wasn’t an explosives specialist in any official sense, but his fascination with them went beyond mere hobby and into actual artistry.

Being a dual citizen of the great state of Maine and Quebec City, Canada, Dernier also carried an impressive repertoire of French Canadian profanity. We knew most of the individual words already, had heard him shout out foreign curses in the field, or mutter them under his breath when he lost a hand in thirty-two-card poker with Falsworth’s funny deck. As we moved from place to place in search of Dugan’s hat, Dernier taught us how to string the _sacres_ together for maximum effect. By the time we reached the makeshift movie hall the most recent showing had ended, the audience had dispersed, and we were saying things like _Osti de tabarnak de calice!_ every time we looked under a chair or behind a flap in the tent only to find that Dugan’s hat was not there.

Dugan was the only one who didn’t join in, drawing further and further into himself as the night wore on, with his hat still nowhere to be found. He kept getting this look on his face, eyes open but unseeing, mouth pressed together until it turned white. And every time someone yelled, _Tabernak!_ and laughed, it seemed to push him further and further away.

 

Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes carried a photograph of a seven-year-old boy, small and bird-boned, with a shock of fair hair and sunburn on his nose, and a letter from his baby sister telling him how the teeth she lost were growing in again. He would sometimes spend hours in his foxhole staring down at one or both of them, running his fingers along the edges, careful not to touch the gloss of the photograph or the ink of the letter, even though he always rationed out water from his canteen to scrub the gun oil and dirt from his hands before he took them out. When he wasn’t looking at them he kept them wrapped in plastic and tucked in the left breast pocket of his fatigue jacket, so they wouldn’t get torn by the recoil of his rifle, and so he could keep them close to his chest. As he wrote once in a letter to his kid sister, _Riding shotgun by my heart_.

Second Lieutenant Steven Grant Rogers, who was an NCO before his battlefield commission, an NYU student before that, and the little boy in Barnes’ photograph before everything, carried a sketchbook and several pencils lined upright like soldiers in a dented aluminum tin. He carried a small flat knife designed specifically to sharpen them, though he later lost it somewhere along the banks of the Song Tra Bong and started using Barnes’ straight razor instead. The sketchbook he carried was the same one he’d used at NYU during the four years he spent there as a scholarship student, and over half the pages were filled with nude figure studies from his life-drawing classes and anti-war cartoons he’d drafted for the university paper.

He’d shown me a more recent sketch once while we were bunking down for the night, of everyone in our unit as cute, cartoonish monkeys with big fake smiles and round cheeks, decked out in the stars and stripes with guns strapped to their backs. Dugan’s monkey had his old bowler hat perched on its head and Jones’ was blowing on his horn, the one he’d had to leave at home. Barnes’ monkey had a head full of thick, wavy hair as its sole distinguishing feature, and I almost didn’t connect it to him without the fuzzy, close-cropped haircut Army regulations forced us all to keep. Although, at second glance, there was something else that set his monkey apart, its smile slightly more genuine than the rest, tipping toward a smirk around the edges.

While he was flipping through to find that cartoon, I’d caught sight of other drawings, these ones more complete, the lines bolder. One was a nude woman with Peggy Carter’s soft-edged face and plum-dark lips, standing upright and unashamed with her weight on one leg like Botticelli’s _Birth of Venus_ , cupping her own breasts in both hands. The other was a man viewed from the left flank, naked, with one foot braced on an army pack as he bent to unlace his boot, his helmet on his head with its straps hanging loose. He was looking over his shoulder with half-lidded eyes and a smirk like a concealed knife, cigarette hanging from his mouth, his face unmistakable. Something damning shone behind his eyes, but it was proof I hadn’t needed.

Cap and the Sarge each carried extra condoms, though they didn’t realize we knew about it.

Now, having checked all the places Dugan went since he last saw his hat, we’d circled back around to the Alpha tent. Jones had turned the radio back on where it sat under his cot, tuned to a slow jazzy song I didn’t recognize, but Jones was humming softly and Falsworth was bobbing his head to the rhythm.

Steve Rogers sat on his bed drawing Dugan’s hat over and over again in his sketchbook, printing in big block letters underneath, RARE ANCIENT ARTEFACT, LOST. IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO DUM DUM DUGAN OF ALPHA COMPANY. YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND HIM.

Barnes was peering at it over his shoulder and making the occasional helpful suggestion. “Tell them if they steal it,” Barnes said as he leaned back, “I’ll shoot them in the ass. Not too dangerous, but hurts like hell.” He swung his legs up onto Rogers’ bed, boots still on and trailing flakes of caked mud.

Rogers shoved Barnes’ feet off the edge of the cot with one hand. He never stopped drawing with the other, and never looked up from his sketchbook. “How would you know,” he asked absently as he sketched out the precise curve of the bowler’s brim. He was already on his sixth sign. “You been shot in the ass and didn’t tell me?”

“Are you kiddin’,” said Barnes as he swatted Rogers on the back of the head. It only made Cap grin down at the hat he was now shading in. Barnes said, “Not even Charlie would mess with perfection,” and Rogers rolled his eyes.

Dugan was on his back in his own cot, limbs splayed wide like a starfish as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t seem to hear the music, or Jones’ humming, or Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dummer scuffling and sniping on the bed to his right, the Sarge’s foot now in Rogers’ face, filthy and still in the boot, and Cap punching him repeatedly in the ass while shouting, “Ass shot, ass shot, ass shot,” with every hit. The sketchbook had fallen onto the cot beside him, half concealed in the sheets and flipped open to the page with the monkey cartoon.

I thought about grabbing it and showing the drawing to Dugan to cheer him up, but the monkey was wearing his hat.

No one carried tacks, but we found some in the command tent and went around tacking Rogers’ signs to tents and poles, tucking the corners behind metal fence posts to hold them up. The drawings were very realistic, down to the slight dent in the left side of the crown and the exact angle of the Corporal’s chevrons sewn onto the front. Cap had ended up making twenty before his hand began to cramp, and we put them up in the most prominent places, where we figured people were most likely to see them. I was the only one looking when Dugan folded one in half and tucked it into the pocket of his tac pants, buttoning the flap carefully to keep it safe inside.

 

Junior Juniper, who was in our platoon but not our squad, was the one who ended up finding the hat, on the ground behind the latrines. By that time, almost everyone had seen the signs, and he brought it straight to Dugan. The left side of the crown had been dented further, the whole thing collapsed in on itself like a popped basketball or a ruined house with the roof caved in, but Dugan punched it back into place, and pulled it onto his head so it could relearn the shape of his skull.

We went back out into the jungle the next day, and when we stopped for the night Dugan looked at me, and I looked back at him, and we dug a foxhole big enough for two. We did that every once in a while, so we could play a few games of checkers in the last of the daylight, and sometimes the boys would gather around to watch and make bets with whatever they had in their pockets, safety pins and cigarettes and pieces of chewing gum or candy. But on that day when I took out the checkerboard and Rogers started to approach, I looked at him and shook my head. He nodded slightly, just a quick incline of the head, and herded everyone else away. It was just Dugan and me. We shared a foxhole and a cigarette and didn’t talk at all. We smoked the rest of my pack between us.

We packed the checkerboard away with the last of the light clinging along the horizon line, a pink and orange glow that made the thick jungle beneath look black and nebulous, like lingering smoke. Afterwards Dugan sat beside me with his boots propped on the wall of dirt hemming us in, looking up out of our foxhole and into the sky, where stars were starting to blink awake, the deep expanse of space yawning above us. He’d taken his hat off and was twirling it in his hands. He wasn’t looking at it, his eyes lost in the black of the sky, reflecting it back.

As the platoon’s field medic, I carried a heavy box of medical supplies, a large pack of condoms, and extra toilet paper tucked into the band around my helmet. I carried fingernail clippers, although most of the boys used knives or razorblades, and a travel-sized checkerboard with one red checker lost and replaced by a Coke-bottle cap.

I also carried my older brother’s Silver Star.

As Dugan sat staring up into everything and nothing, the whole universe spread out above us from our hole in the ground, I fished the Star out of my pack, carefully lifted it from the scuffed box I kept it in, and handed it wordlessly over to Dugan. He looked down, startled, when it landed in his hat.

He picked it up and rubbed his thumb over its face like he was trying to shine it, to rub away dust or dirt that wasn’t there.

“It’s—“

“My brother’s,” I said.

“He’s—“

“Dead.” I nodded. “Saved three men in his unit,” I said, and paused for a moment. Sighed. “We got a thank you letter from one of ‘em. Got that Silver Star from Uncle Sam. Got his body back, too.”

I laughed a little, a short harsh sound, and Dugan looked at me with his mouth pinched at the corner, his eyes sad.

“The guy who wrote the letter, he was surprised, you know? They called Joe some pretty awful things. Threatened him. Called him Charlie, called him a gook. Kept asking when he’d switch to the other side. Guess that guy didn’t think a man would do a thing like that, lay out on the wire for them, after everything. They didn’t know Joe at all. Didn’t want to. And now they owe him, and he’s dead. I don’t know how they live with that.”

Dugan rubbed his thumb over the Silver Star one more time, nodded slowly, and handed it back.

He was quiet for a long time, eyes back on the sky, and then after a while he said, “With a good enough sniper, it don’t matter that bullets can’t punch through helmets. My buddy, they got him right through the eye. Right under his helmet. It was just fucking… gone. His whole eye gone, the cheekbone caved in, it was—that helmet didn’t do a fucking thing. Not a fuckin’ thing. That heavy metal helmet, all that weight he carried around, and for _nothin’_.” Dugan sighed and stared at the sky and said, “I don’t wanna die under all that useless fucking _weight.”_

I nodded too, but he wasn’t looking at me. I watched him for a second, and then turned to look at the sky, both of us sitting there in a hole in the ground staring up, up, up, into the past, into the future, into a place where none of it mattered at all, into eternity, into infinite space and unfathomable emptiness broken once in a long, long while by floating rocks or searing bodies of flame and motion and sometimes, occasionally, the short tiny burst of a single human life.

And while time and space stretched on and on, past planets and suns and vast sprawling galaxies, those human lives would end. We were going to die. Maybe not here, maybe not now, but we would. We all would. No helmet and no songs and no amount of bravery could hope to save us. No letters or Silver Stars or bowler hats could ever bring us back.

We all carried that knowledge with us, too. We carried our own lives, our own deaths, the deaths of our brothers and fathers and friends. We carried the sky.

I put my brother’s medal back in its box and put the box back in my pack, and Dugan set his father’s bowler hat back on his head. We sat in our foxhole until we fell asleep, and slept until Falsworth shook us awake to take the next watch, and watched until it was time for us to shake Cap and the Sarge awake, and headed back to our foxhole to sleep once again. And when we woke up, we climbed out of our foxhole and set off humping toward the next village. We carried our packs. We carried our flak jackets and helmets and jungle boots. We carried on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Brandi Carlile's "The Things I Regret"


	2. Moses, Don’t You Leave My Children Behind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in as many days! I am on break for the week so I'm sorry to say I will not be this prolific moving forward. The chapter after this is almost ready, but I draft each chapter at least three times each and everything after that is on draft 1. I'm not even 100% sure on the chapter order, honestly... so yeah, this is a reminder that the author is a disaster.
> 
> Pretentious song-lyric titles are pretentious. This whole thing is pretentious. Hope you like it anyway.
> 
> (This one is from "You Better Run to the City of Refuge" by Dr. Claude Joseph Johnson)

Bucky Barnes was with us twenty-three days before Steve Rogers caught up to him. No one knew how Rogers managed to get himself into the same unit as Barnes, and in truth I never thought to ask. It felt strange during those first few days after he hopped off the helicopter along with the C-rations, but by the next week the question of his presence seemed fully answered. Of course Steve Rogers was there. Steve Rogers was there because Bucky Barnes was there. Where one went, the other followed. It was to us simple cause and effect, like a gun being fired and the sound of the shot.

But before that, there was just Bucky Barnes. That’s how we saw it, anyway. We didn’t realize it at the time, but everywhere he went in those twenty-three days, Bucky Barnes was accompanied by the absence of Steve Rogers. We saw it, but we didn’t get it. We didn’t know what it meant.

Mostly, we just thought the guy was a fucking weirdo. During the day we humped single-file through miles of dense jungle, over minefields and rice paddies under the weight of our guns and gear, heavy with our own sweat. Every so often, Barnes would look over his shoulder and stare at the man behind him as though he’d expected to see someone else. At dusk, while we were sitting around a small dry fire we weren’t supposed to light, smoking and eating and shooting the shit, he’d tell half a joke and pause like he expected someone else to jump in and finish it. He would eat half his rations, sometimes less than half, and start to pack them up. Then he’d look up and glance around, eyes narrowed in vague confusion, like he was searching for something, before he’d take the rations back out and finish them off. Every night, he dug a foxhole big enough for two men and left the right half empty, curled up on one side with all his gear, like he was waiting for someone else to slip in beside him.

He probably could have grown a little less strange over the course of those twenty-three days, as he got used to living in an immediate world without Steve Rogers in it. He could have remembered to eat all his rations without the stuttered rhythm of something out of place. He could have put down his E-tool when he noticed his foxhole getting bigger than it strictly needed to be. After a while, he stopped waiting for someone to finish his jokes, but the other things didn’t change in all the time he was with us while Steve Rogers was not. I don’t think he wanted them to. It was faith through remembrance, the spatial equivalent to a moment of silence. If he couldn’t have Steve Rogers, he would keep open the place in his world where Steve Rogers was supposed to be, like bloody fingers holding apart the sides of a wound to keep it from closing, in hopes that it would scar. Steve Rogers wasn’t simply absent from Barnes’ life. He was missing.

Y’know, Barnes would say later, gesturing to the foxhole he’d dug them, I literally had a Steve Rogers-shaped hole in my life. And Cap would smile and blush, and Dugan and I would share a knowing look behind their backs.

In a way, during those twenty-three days, there was a lightness to Barnes that disappeared when Steve Rogers caught up to him. He still looked over his shoulder, but he looked back less often, and he was confused when he saw a face that did not belong to Steve Rogers, but his puzzlement was relatively benign. He smirked a lot and joked around, even if his real smiles were hard to earn and quick to flee. He sometimes gazed into the distance as though looking for something out past the mountains, unmoved by the sounds and constant motion of the men around him sorting through their gear, like he wasn’t there at all. But even as he sat staring into space, there was a certain peace in him. When Steve Rogers arrived, that longing morphed into a dark cast of worry Barnes couldn’t seem to shake. He took to walking behind Steve Rogers to keep him constantly in sight. Hey, he’d say, looking at Rogers when we stopped to dig our foxholes for the night. Hey. As if to say, I’m with you.

And Rogers would ask, To the end of the line? And Barnes would crack a smile, a real one, and say, To the end of the line.

On the eighteenth day Barnes was with us, five days before Rogers hopped off the resupply chopper and into the place Barnes kept open for him, Alpha Company took heavy mortar fire while passing through the village of Than Khe. Bucky Barnes did an odd thing that day, but Bucky Barnes was odd, so no one thought much of it. It was the first time I ever saw the look that would become a familiar thing after Rogers’ arrival, worry dark in Barnes’ eyes and tight around his mouth.

We wouldn’t understand the significance of what happened that day until much later, long after Steve Rogers caught up to us.

We were less than half a mile out from the village when the first mortar dropped. One second we were humping steadily forward, our packs heavy on our backs, counting down the minutes until we stopped for the night. Thinking of the close dark solitude of a foxhole, the warmth inside the earth and the slow slide into sleep, eager even for the cold dinner of meatballs-and-beans we would eat straight from the can. And then the earth itself seemed to burst open in a rush of fire and blood, like the Seventh Seal breaking, Lucifer rising from below.

The mortar fell fifty feet in front of First Lieutenant Abraham Erskine, who was leading the single-file line of eighteen men that made up our platoon. Bucky Barnes was right behind him. The blast from the mortar hit them both full-on, little pieces of debris and a shower of dirt from its impact with the ground flying up like the warm spray of blood from a severed artery. Shards of metal from the mortar left tiny cuts on the exposed skin of their hands and necks. I remember Barnes’ shocked face, mud and blood smeared together across his cheeks and forehead like swirls of ghastly face paint. A scared boy playing at soldier on Halloween.

That moment seemed to last forever, stretched out like elastic, the fine dark dust of pulverized earth hanging suspended in front of us and the men of Alpha Company staring into it like the elusive answer to some unknown question might be found there, if only we looked hard enough. Then the second mortar hit just left of Dugan’s flank and the world sped up, so fast it left us behind. There was no time to think anymore. Only to react.

It was chaos, metal and earth exploding all around us, firing through the smoke and the dust toward targets we couldn’t see. We didn’t know where the mortars were coming from, just threw up a Hail Mary and picked a direction to point and shoot, prayed we weren’t putting bullets in our own guys. The mortars hit and we scattered like marbles away from the blast. My gun felt heavy in my hands. Dirt from another mortar flew into my mouth. A blast at my back threw me forward several feet, right into the butt of Falsworth’s gun.

Through it all we kept moving with fits and starts in a direction we hoped was the right one, limping along in a crooked, writhing line like a giant wounded centipede. I thought I heard voices amidst the thunder of falling mortars, people I knew or thought I knew or heard once in a half-remembered dream. Telling me I was going to die, telling me not to die, telling me to press on, telling me to leave. Asking if I was feeling well, because I looked like I might be sick any second.

And then, as we reached the outskirts of the village, everything stopped. The last mortar dropped and the silence that followed lay heavy and unbroken all around us, like the whole village holding its breath. The voices I’d heard in the explosions were silent now, and I could hear the blood pumping in my own head.

Looking back, it’s a miracle we didn’t lose anyone. At the time I was too stunned and numb to even count heads, but I could see Barnes and Lieutenant Erskine doing so at the front of the line. There was no one writhing around on the ground, no one I needed to tend to immediately, and the only injuries I could see were rough cuts bleeding sluggishly on several men’s faces. We were shaky but alive. Dugan behind me took his hat off his head and beat it several times with the flat of his hand to shake off the dirt. “Hey Morita,” he said as hard kernels of soil shot off the brim, “You want some popcorn? It’s a little burnt, but still good.” On my other side Junior laughed a little thickly and tried to pretend he wasn’t wiping tears and snot off his face with the cuff of his sleeve.

The air still smelled like burning. One of the houses nearby was on fire, smoke billowing out from empty windows and cracks in the roof that may have been ripped open by the mortar blasts or may have been there all along. It was impossible to tell. A few feet outside the front door, a small boy was down on his knees in the dirt, gasping. His clothes were black with earth and ash. He clutched his stomach with both hands, as if he might explode when he let go, as if his bones might scatter like jackstraws in the dust. His eyes were wide open and fixed on the burning house. The fire was in his eyes, reflected. There were tears there, too, but they didn’t touch it.

I thought he was just crying. His house was on fire. Perhaps his family had been inside. He kept gasping and gasping, hugging his stomach, rocking back and forth to soothe himself, or perhaps nothing so deliberate, his body propelled by the force of his sobbing. It wouldn’t let up. By the time I realized something else was wrong Barnes had already stepped forward to crouch down beside him.

Barnes was not a short man. He was already broad-shouldered and leanly muscled, and the boxy fatigues lent him bulk, hardened him around the edges. There was a gun strapped across his back, a broad hunting knife sheathed around his thigh over the top of his tac pants. But crouched low with empty hands, his elbows on his knees and his helmet by his feet, he just looked young.

He spoke to the child in a low voice. From where I stood upwind of the smoke, I couldn’t hear the words. Only the slow gentle cadence of them, and the way his vowels stretched and flattened, his New York accent growing heavier. I doubt the words mattered. The boy didn’t know English, but when Barnes spoke it seemed to resonate beyond language, to touch some universal plane of understanding that drew the child out of his head.

When the boy looked over at him, Barnes lifted his own arms and laced his fingers behind his head. His face was still streaked with mud and blood. Like this, he said to the boy. I could see his lips move with the words, but the boy just stared at him. He didn’t understand. Barnes dropped his arms and did it again, slower this time, and gestured at the boy with his chin.

Later Hodge, who had taken a piece of shrapnel to the forearm, called him Nurse Barnes, shouting across camp for kisses on his boo boo as I stitched him up, but Barnes just ignored it. Either it didn’t bother him, or he didn’t let it.

They were too close to the fire. The flames raged less than ten feet away and the air where he crouched must have been hot enough to scald, but Barnes kept his eyes on the boy’s face, hands on the back of his head, and breathed. After an uncertain moment the boy did the same. He put his hands on his head and locked his fingers together. He breathed. The fire was in his eyes. It was devouring his house from the inside out, tongues of flame licking black scars up the walls. They were standing too close.

I wondered idly where Barnes had learned to do that, but it was a fleeting thought, gone by the time Barnes stood up. He put a hand on the boy’s head. They both watched the house as it burned before them, the roof now completely caved in, the fire still burning hot and strong, uncaring. Beside me, Dugan had put his hat back on his head. He was watching them, too.

The boy put his own hand on top of Barnes’ for a moment. It looked tiny there. Barnes stared down at him, at their overlapping hands, his face dark and tight with that worried expression I’d never seen before. He patted the boy’s head once, and the boy’s hand moved with his. He stood there, arms folded now, until the walls of the house collapsed and an older man came to lead the boy away. Even then he stayed for a moment, staring at the scorched-out place where a house had been, where a family had lived, watching the flames as they writhed in the throes of death. He was standing too close. I could see the fire in his eyes.


	3. No Place for the Old

Between the end of the war and the start of the new millennium, I saw Steve Rogers three times: once at the ceremony where I received my decorations, once unplanned in a New York City grocery store, and once in 1974 when our unit and the surviving members of Happy Sam Sawyer’s went out for drinks on the fifth anniversary of his death.

Dugan’s job brought him out to California regularly, so I saw him several times a year, often for a week or more at a time. He never did settle down, never managed to keep a marriage afloat after his first wife died in 1971. But Rogers settled down, and after Happy Sam’s unofficial memorial in ’74, I didn’t see him again until the autumn of 2000, more than a quarter century later.

I was in New York on a whim, wandering the streets at the tail end of a month-long fight with my wife. We’d dropped Beth off at Berkeley in August with boxes full of all her things, and Joe was already working a desk job at some big corporation in San Francisco. Both Katherine and I were still chafing at the newness of an empty house, the way our raised voices carried and echoed in all that silent space, the way our harsh words lingered there, trapped. We’d forgotten how to live alone.

I was running, but I didn’t want to think about it, so I went to visit Steve at his apartment in Brooklyn and tried to forget.

I’d called ahead that morning from a diner in Manhattan, on a sticky phone tucked in the back corner, and Steve was already smiling when he opened the door. We talked on the phone often enough, exchanged Christmas cards every year, but it was the first time I’d seen him face-to-face in twenty-six years. He gave me a quick, hard hug, sat me at the red granite island in his kitchen, brought me a coffee the way I used to take it during R&R, and settled across from me with a cup of his own. “I’d offer you a cigarette,” he said, “but we don’t smoke in the house.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I quit.” I smiled a little, wryly, and said, “Apparently those things’ll kill you.”

Rogers laughed and took a sip of his coffee. “Lotta things’ll kill you. Good for you, though, quitting,” he said. His hair was sticking up in the front, like he’d been running his fingers through it the way he used to do when he was thinking, or drawing. “We tried, me and Buck,” he said, “but we never could kick it. I’m pretty sure it gives Nat heart palpitations, but she’d never say it. Just tells us not to smoke away her college money. Clint keeps telling us we’re gonna die of cancer.”

He smiled with his whole body, just like I remembered, shoulders loose and hands open, his coffee cup sitting on the countertop in front of him.

“Sixteen, God,” he said in wonder. “Were we ever really that young? Sometimes I feel like I was born tired.”

“You don’t look too bad.”

He smiled. “I look fifty-four,” he said. His smile faded and he scrubbed a hand through his hair until it stood up in the back, too. “Honestly, we have good days and bad days. Buck and I got the battle fatigue pretty bad. But I guess they don’t call it that anymore.” He shrugged a little and laughed again. “Don’t let me get maudlin, Jim,” he said. “I ain’t even drunk, there’s no excuse. Tell me about Beth.”

We talked about Beth and Joe and Clint and Natasha, about Rogers’ best friend Sam Wilson, a younger vet who worked at the VA and sometimes dragged Steve along to help out. How Steve occasionally sat in on the meetings his friend led, lurking in the back row and saying nothing. He’d listen to other, younger soldiers talk about their own war, the things they saw, the things they did. The things they weren’t brave enough to do.

Steve swirled the last cold dregs of his coffee and said, “It’s not a new war, not really.”

It wasn’t true in the literal sense, and maybe someone who’s never slept in a hole in the ground or humped for miles over unfamiliar land or eaten a cold meal out of a can would think it an odd thing to say, but I knew what he meant. War is never new. It never has been. Different place, different time, different justifications. Same old regrets. War was made to bring men to their knees. And it had been a long time since I’d thought Steve Rogers was anything more than a man. Anything more than another scared kid lying belly-down in a ranger grave, praying for the bombs to stop.

Natasha and Clint tramped in while Rogers was telling me a story about Wilson, how they ran together every morning and always tried to lap each other, how they weren’t afraid to fight dirty. I was half-listening, trying not to think about Katherine all alone in our big empty house on the other side of the country.

We looked up when Natasha kicked the door closed. They pulled off their shoes and kicked them aside, Natasha’s black combat boots and Clint’s purple sneakers jumbled together in a messy little pile under the coat pegs. They were arguing silently as they passed through the kitchen, the same way I remembered Cap and the Sarge holding whole conversations over our heads with just their eyebrows, no words at all. Natasha was wearing Barnes’ old fatigue jacket, recognizable by the heavy wear in the shoulder from the butt of his rifle resting there and recoiling. Their speaking expressions were interspersed with quick, shorthand signs in bastardized ASL, and I noted the purple hearing aid peeking out from behind Clint’s ear.

Rogers stopped them halfway between the island where we sat and the doors at the back of the apartment. “Hey,” he said. “We have a guest.”

They both mumbled hellos, staring at their socked feet, and Steve stopped them again when they tried to slink away. “What, not even gonna say hi to your old Da? You know, you used to hug me every time you came home.”

Natasha stared at him blankly. “I don’t hug,” she said.

Clint grinned, hugged Rogers tight around the neck with one arm, and stole the last cold sip of his coffee with the other. His hair was very blond under the kitchen lights, and with the cowlick in the front it looked a lot like Steve’s, still standing up where he’d rubbed his hand through it earlier.

Steve ruffled Clint’s hair, pushed him away, and sent them off to do their homework. “Go on,” he said. “Before Dad gets home.”

Natasha didn’t hug him, but she did lean into him a little, shoulder pressed to his. Her red, red hair swaying toward him on one side and falling over her other cheek. Steve kissed her ear and nudged her away with his elbow. “Homework,” he said.

“I’m going back to the Russians,” she said. “They appreciated me.”

Rogers hid a smile behind his empty coffee cup. “ _Go_ ,” he said.

Steve and I each had another cup of coffee, and after that we switched over to the whiskey on top of the refrigerator, coming on four o’clock in the afternoon and knocking it back like it was water. Six fingers in and we were starting to feel it, getting just a little sloppy around the edges. “There’s your excuse,” I told Steve. He gave me a funny look, and I said, “To be maudlin.”

He got this crooked little smile, the way he did when he was laughing at himself, and said, “Don’t got much to be maudlin about.” His New York accent came thicker with the whiskey, long, lazy vowels crowding out the consonants. “Me and Buck, we spent the Summer of Love same as anyone back home.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Getting love tapped by AK47s?”

His smile got wider. “I was gonna say fucking who we wanted and damn the laws and consequences.” Then he turned and shouted, “Get off your Gameboy, Clint! I’m old, but I ain’t clueless,” and on the other side of their door I heard Clint loudly asking Natasha, “Do you think the Russians would take me, too?”

Things went quiet for a while after that. I could hear the kids talking quietly through the wall and the tick of the kitchen clock, the rush of whiskey when Steve poured us both another glass.

“You know, we knew that you knew,” Steve said suddenly. “You and Dugan. We knew you’d never tell.” He tipped his glass toward me a little. “We never said thank you for that.”

I shook my head. “C’mon, Cap. _Hodge_ knew, and he never said a word either. The day I’m a bigger bastard than Gilmore Hodge, you better blow my fucking head off.”

Steve laughed a little and raised his glass. “To being less of a bastard than Gilmore Hodge,” he said.

I lifted my glass, too, and said, “To fucking who you want and damn the consequences.”

I heard a noise by the front door and we both looked up. Barnes was standing on the threshold, and he was looking right at Steve. Their gazes locked, and for a moment it was like being back in ‘Nam all over again, the way they held whole conversations with just their eyes, Cap sitting in the light and the Sarge hanging back, sticking to the shadows like they were a part of him. But then the harsh kitchen light glanced off Barnes’s prosthetic, and the illusion was broken.

Steve smiled. He lifted his glass, joking, and said, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

Barnes skirted the island and came right up next to Steve. Steve put his hand on Barnes’ hip, and Barnes stole his tumbler and said, “Here’s losing.” He knocked it back.

I stared at Barnes for a second. He stared back. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” And I knocked it back, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues


End file.
